Facebook, Source of Deathless Prose

By

Daniel Akst

Jan 24, 2013 7:00 am ET

Facebook postings are more memorable than faces or sentences from books. How much more memorable? The magnitude is “comparable to the difference in memory strength between amnesics and healthy controls,” a new paper reports.

Researchers showed Facebook status updates from unidentified users to undergraduate volunteers and found that these postings were 1.5 times more memorable than sentences randomly selected from books, and almost 2.5 times more memorable than anonymous neutral faces.

The researchers suggest that quickly and effortlessly generated Facebook updates “are naturally more mind-ready” and digestible for humans. “These especially memorable Facebook posts and reader comments, generated by ordinary people, may be far closer than professionally crafted sentences to tapping into the basic language capacities of our minds,” the researchers wrote.